"Advanced Viewers Only"

There's a BBC America commercial that shows a Monty Python sketch with John Cleese and Michael Palin playing Frenchmen, and the caption reads, "If your girlfriend laughs at this, marry her." I suppose I could go two ways on that. I could go the way of, "Oh, how simple life would be, if only..." or I could go the way of, "If your boyfriend proposes to you at the behest of a commercial for BBC America..." I think both routes sound more bitter than I would have intended.

But while we're on the subject of commercials, when I retell this little exchange between me and Beulah, I sometimes laugh so hard I have tears streaming down my cheeks. We were watching a commercial for, I think, PediaCare, and it shows a mother expressing deep concern and trying to comfort her son, who is sick. Beulah said, "She's not even his mom." In the next scene, the boy is shown miserable in bed, being given his dose of PediaCare, and I said, "He's not really sick." The final act of the commercial shows the boy laughing -- all better -- and playing with a toy camera on a tripod, and Beulah cried out, "He's not a photographer!" It was priceless.